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Saturday, December 6, 2014

African American literary studies & print culture

Brittany Tuggle makes presentation at Senior Assignment Conference

This semester, my newest colleague Elizabeth Cali taught one of our department's senior seminars. Throughout the semester, she introduced the students in her class to aspects of print culture studies. On Friday, at the Senior Assignment conference, Cali's students presented work, including a few different papers on what we might call black print culture studies.

Two students, Brittany Tuggle and Tiffany Tuggle, who've previously taken our African American literature courses, presented their research on publications that showcased works by black writers. Taken together, their presentations highlighted why mediums mater in the production of black literary art.

Two other students, Victoria Mizel and Brianne Harris, who took Cali's course this semester, made presentations concerning activism and Twitter. The students noted that they had covered Twitter as an alternative publishing space in their seminar with Cali, and that led them to produce projects about how writers or general citizens utilized the social media site to convey and transmit ideas.

Selection of paper topics by Cali's students:

• Brittany Tuggle "Artistic Agency Within a Literary Publication: The Ways Fire!! Rejected the New Negro Idealists
• Tiffany Tuggle "Race and Print Culture: The Freedom to Express"
• Victoria Mizel "Twitter Activism: A Voice and a Platform for the People of #Ferguson"
• Brianne Harris "Reconsidering Twitter Activism: An Analysis of Teju Cole's 'A Piece of the Wall'"

Cali looks on as students present papers

Cali's class was not promoted as one of our regular African American literature courses, but at the conference, it was clear that the materials she presented to her students coincided with what we typically cover in the courses. As a result, African American literary studies had a notable presence at Senior Assignment Conference.